Modern
counter-insurgency is rarely a purely military problem for a government and its
Security Forces. Of this basic truism, the experience in Rhodesia between 1966
and 1979 affords a significant example. Not only were the efforts of the
Rhodesian Security Forces frequently directed towards particular political
goals, but their ultimate failure to contain insurgency at an acceptable level
derived to a large extent from external political pressures over which they had
little control.

In
a real sense, Rhodesia was the creation of private enterprise rather than the
British government, the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes annexing
Mashonaland in 1890 and Matabeleland in 1893. The Company continued to run the
administration until, following a referendum of the white settlers which
indicated their long-standing disillusionment with such control, Southern
Rhodesia as it was then known became a self-governing colony in 1923. Far more
prosperous than either Northern Rhodesia or Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia
effectively dominated the Central African Federation into which it entered with
these neighbours in 1953. The Federation collapsed in 1963, with Northern
Rhodesia and Nyasaland becoming the independ­ent black states of Zambia and
Malawi respectively in the following year. The larger white settler population
in Southern Rhodesia rejected the concept of majority rule, a determination
reinforced by the spectre of chaos in the Belgian Congo in 1960 and by the urban
unrest in Southern Rhodesia itself which followed the rejection by the growing
black nationalist movement of the proposed 1961 constitution, despite its
greater participat­ory role for the African.

The nationalist movement had developed in the
1950s with Joshua Nkomo’s African National Congress being established in 1957.
Banned on a number of occasions, Nkomo’s group re­emerged under different
titles, becoming the National Demo­cratic Party in 1960 and the Zimbabwe
African People’s Union(ZAPU)
in 1962. The nationalists were moving towards the advocacy of violence to
achieve their political aims at the very time when white resistance was
symbolised by the sweeping electoral victories of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front
Party in December 1962. The advent of a Labour administration in Britain in
1964, dedicated to majority rule, catapulted all sides closer to confrontation
and, on 11 November 1965, Ian Smith issued a Unilateral Declaration of
Independence (UDI).

The
war that evolved in Rhodesia thereafter has to be seen in the context of
continuing political and diplomatic activity aimed at securing Rhodesian
acceptance of majority rule and the end of rebellion against the Crown. The
British rejected the use of force, although they did resort to largely
ineffectual economic sanctions, including the so-called Beira Patrol off the
coast of Portuguese Mozambique from 1965 to 1974, when the latter became
independent. Similarly, British troops were stationed in Bechuanaland (later
Botswana) from 1965 to 1967 to guard a BBC transmitter at Francistown from
possible Rhodesian sabo­tage. In December 1966 Smith met the British prime
minister, Harold Wilson, for talks aboard HMS Tiger
and there were more negotiations aboard HMS Fearless
in September 1968. The subsequent Conservative government sent the abortive
Pearce Commission to Rhodesia from January to May 1972 to test the acceptability
of new Anglo-Rhodesian proposals on a constitution.

Following the collapse of Portuguese control in
Mozambique, Rhodesia not only became more exposed to guerrilla infiltration, but
also suffered increasing pressure from the South African prime minister, John
Vorster, to reach an accommodation with the guerrillas. A brief ceasefire came
into effect in December 1974 and, although this failed, Vorster and Zambia’s
president, Kenneth Kaunda, arranged negotiations between Ian Smith and
nationalist leaders on the Victoria Falls bridge in August 1975. There were
further talks between Smith and Nkomo in early 1976 and in September of that
year, under considerable South African pressure, Smith conceded the principle of
majority rule within the context of an overall agreement worked out by Vorster
and the United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. A conference at
Geneva from October 1976 to January 1977, however, failed to produce a
settlement acceptable to all parties, and further proposals put forward by the
British and USgovernments
in September 1977 also came to nothing. Ian Smith then reached an internal
settlement with three nationalist leaders

—
Bishop Abel
Muzorewa, the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole and Chief Jeremiah Chirau —
in March 1978,
by which Muzorewa and Sithole entered a transitional government. This did not,
however, rule out further negotiations between Smith and Nkomo in Lusaka in
August 1978. In April 1979, as a result of internal elections, Muzorewa became
the first black prime minister of Rhodesia. The republic declared in March 1970
was formally brought to an end in June 1979 with the creation of
Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. The final political turn of events was the Lancaster House
Conference in London between September and December 1979, which resulted in a
British-supervised ceasefire on 28 December 1979 and a transitional British
administration under Lord Soames as governor. Elections were held in February
1980 with Zimbabwe gaining full legal independence in April.

These complicated political events between 1965
and 1980 inevitably affected the conduct of the war inside Rhodesia and across
its frontiers, although large-scale conflict did not occur before December 1972.
Thus Security Force operations could be undertaken to put direct pressure upon
the guerrillas in order to achieve political results in the wider diplomatic
field. In October 1976, for example, the Rhodesians frustrated guerrilla
attempts to launch an offensive coinciding with the Geneva Conference by
themselves striking deep into Mozambique. Similarly, the highly successful Rhodesian attack on New Chimoio (Operation ‘Miracle’) in Mozambique in
September 1979 put pressure on the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA)
during the Lancaster House Conference. Moreover, there was a whole series of
attacks on economic targets in both Mozambique and Zambia, designed to compel
the guerrillas’ hosts — Kaunda and Samora Machel, President of Mozambique
— to ensure that their clients adopted a more
positive approach to the negotiations. In September 1979, for example, Rhodesia
suspended Zambian maize shipments on Rhodesian railways, Zambia having been
forced by economic pressure to reopen its frontiers with Rhodesia in 1978. In
October 1979 Zambia’s own railway system came under Rhodesian attack, while it
has been estimated that Mozambique suffered over 26 million dollars’ worth of
damage in 1979.1In February 1979 Angolan targets had been bombed by the
Rhodesian Air Force to frustrate any guerrilla build-up priorto
the internal elections.

The
fact that the ZANLA guerrillas and those of the Zimbabwe People’s
Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) operated from sanctuaries in other countries,
resulted in further political complications. In January 1973 Rhodesia closed its
frontier with Zambia, with the exception of copper shipments, as a direct result
of the escalation of guerrilla activity in the north-east of Rhodesia. The
Rhodesians subsequently reopened the frontier but, as indicated above, Zambia
then declined to do so until 1978. Similarly, Mozambique closed its frontiers
with Rhodesia in March 1976 and by the end of the war only the 222 km (138 mile)
frontier with South Africa out of a total frontier length of 2964 km (1841
miles) was entirely free of infiltration. The Rhodesians had, in fact, begun
operating up to 100 km (62 miles) inside Mozambique in co-operation with the
Portuguese as early as 1969. The first large-scale cross-border raid was not
launched, however, until August 1979 (Operation ‘Eland’). Such raids
occurred frequently thereafter, often coinciding with the imminent approach of
the rainy season in November and hitting the guerrilla concentrations that would
have attempted to infiltrate under favourable climatic conditions that
restricted Rhodesia’s monopoly of air power. Physical difficulties as well as
political restraint precluded large-scale raids into Zambia until October 1978,
when the first took place in direct response to the shooting down of a Rhodesian
Viscount civil airliner a month previously by ZIPRA, who had then massacred the
survivors. A second airliner was shot down in February 1979, eliciting the air
strike into Angola although, as already indicated above, the operation fulfilled
other requirements as well. There was also an attempt to kill Nkomo in Lusaka in
April 1979 while, earlier in the same year, Rhodesian forces had sunk the
Kasangula ferry which was Botswana’s only link with Zambia. But, just as the
neighbouring black states were to some extent dependent upon Rhodesia’s
railways for their survival, Rhodesia itself after UDI was equally dependent
upon external sources.

With the withdrawal of the Portuguese,
Rhodesia’s lifeline lay through South Africa, but it is clear that Vorster
sacrificed Rhodesian whites in the cause of wider detente with black states.
Thus although elements of the South African police were committed to assist the
Rhodesians in 1967, they were withdrawn by August 1975 to facilitate the attempt
by Kaunda to get thenationalists
to negotiate and, equally, to put pressure on Smith to do the same. In fact, a
number of South African pilots and technicians remained in Rhodesia, but they
were also recalled following the first major raid into Mozambique in August 1976
which Vorster feared would jeopardise relations with Machel. Furthermore, the
South African foreign minister then broadcast his government’s support for
majority rule in Rhodesia which, as two recent historians of the war have
written, ‘pulled the rug’ from under Ian Smith.2 Subsequently,
Vorster’s successor as prime minister, P.W. Botha, went some way towards
reversing the situation by lending the Rhodesians military equipment and
personnel and committing South African troops to defend key points such as the
Beit Bridge which linked Rhodesia and South Africa across the River Limpopo.

Vorster
had feared the consequences of any escalation in the war between Rhodesia and
its neighbours and there were inevitably clashes between Rhodesian forces and
those of the black states. On one notable occasion in September 1979 during the
attack on New Chimoio, Rhodesian Eland armoured cars, a version of the Panhard,
engaged Soviet-supplied T-34 tanks of the Mozambique Army (FPLM). On such raids
the Rhodesians invariably had two Hawker Hunter jets armed with 68 mm rockets
avilable as an anti-tank reaction force.3 Curiously, the Rhodesians
themselves also had some Soviet T-55 tanks, which had been landed in South
Africa instead of the intended destination of Uganda when Idi Amin’s regime
fell in 1979. But incursions into neighbouring states also carried the
possibility of clashing with the wide variety of foreign nationals —
Chinese,
Russians, Cubans and so on — who advised the guerrillas. In the case of the struggle for New Chimoio,
for example, East German advisers fought with ZANLA guerrillas. The guerrillas
were, of course, also sustained by many other external organisations, including
the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the World Council of Churches and the
Third World lobby in the United Nations.

The involvement of both Chinese and Soviet
advisers with the guerrillas is in itself an indication that the struggle inside
Rhodesia was yet further complicated by the existence of deep rivalries within
the nationalist movement. As early as 1963 Sithole had split away from Nkomo’s
ZAPU to form the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). To a large extentthe
split was along tribal lines, ZAPU being based on the minority Ndebele of
western Rhodesia and ZANU on the majority Shona of eastern Rhodesia. This
contributed to the tendency of the two organisations to operate in what might be
termed the area of their ‘natural’ support. Thus ZAPU and its military wing,
ZIPRA, operated out of Zambia and Botswana, while ZANU and its military wing,
ZANLA, operated out of Mozambique. While the early guerrillas of both
organisations had trained in diverse or even the same countries overseas, ZIPRA
came increasingly to reflect Soviet orthodoxy and ZANLA to reflect Chinese
theories of rural guerrilla warfare. Thus a feature of the war after 1972 was
the reluctance of Nkomo to commit large numbers of his ZIPRA forces to Rhodesia,
preferring to retain them in Zambia for a Soviet-style conventional assault at
an appropriate moment. Indeed, a number of Rhodesian spoiling operations in late
1979 were specifically mounted to disrupt the ZIPRA build-up, including the
destruction of key road bridges which might have been used to throw ZIPRA armour
across the Zambezi.

ZANLA also briefly considered a conventional
assault in 1979 to establish a provisional government inside Rhodesia, but for
the most part the approach of the two groups was markedly different. This made
co-operation between ZANLA and ZIPRA difficult and there were further break-aways
such as that of James Chikerema, who left ZAPU to form the Front for the
Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI), forcing a hasty and temporary junction of
ZIPRA and ZANLA in a Joint Military Command in 1972. Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who
had emerged during the Pearce Commission as a nationalist of some authority, and
his United African National Council (UANC) was recognised by the OAU in 1974 as
a means of uniting the disparate guerrilla struggle. Muzorewa ‘joined together
with Nkomo, Sithole and Chikerema to form a Zimbabwe Liberation Council in 1975,
while ZIPRA and ZANLA were forced by their black African hosts to create a
unified army in the shape of the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA). This unity
quickly faded, the subsequent union of ZAPU and ZANU in the so-called Patriotic
Front for the purpose of attending the Geneva Conference in 1976 never resulting
in any actual military unity between ZIPRA and ZANLA. Within ZANU, Sithole was
by now being out­manoeuvred by more radical elements and, after his release
fromdetention
inside Rhodesia in 1974, Robert Mugabe became the dominant figure. Thus Sithole,
still heading a group he called ZANU, came together with Muzorewa’s UANC and
Chief Chirau’s insignificant Zimbabwe United People’s Organisation in
aceepting the internal settlement in 1978. Their three parties contested the
internal elections in April 1979, all seeking the Shona vote rathcr than that of
the Ndebele. Subsequently, Chikerema deserted the UANC to form yet another
faction the
Zimbabwe Democratic Party. Throughout the war, therefore, there were divisions
among the nationalists that could be successfully exploited by the Rhodesians as
the internal settlement indicated only too clearly. On occasions there were
clashes between rival guerrillas and a number of major internal upheavals such
as the ‘Nhari Rebellion’ in ZANLA in December 1973 and the assassination of
one of ZANLA’s leaders, Herbert Chitepo, in Lusaka in March 1974 which led to
ZANLA’s virtual expulsion from Zambia.

At the time when insurgency first began, the
complicated nature of the divisions among the nationalists was not apparent and
the nature of the insurgency itself was limited. The first white man was killed
by a so-called ZANU ‘Crocodile Commando’ in July 1964, but the first
systematic attempt to inifitrate guerrillas into Rhodesia did not occur until
April 1966, when a group of 14 ZANU guerrillas crossed into the country from
Zambia. Over the course of the next two years a variety of guerrilla columns
from ZANU, ZAPU and, on occasions, ZAPU guerrillas co­operating with the South
African branch of the African National Congress, were comfortably contained and
successfully elimin­ated by the Rhodesian Security Forces to such an extent
that virtually all insurgency ceased for the next four years. The ease with
which the guerrillas had been defeated did, however, have subsequent
repercussions since it was largely seen as a police action and was controlled by
Rhodesia’s British South Africa Police (BSAP). The Rhodesian Army was rarely
used, even though the BSAP was frequently operating as a conventional military
force with patrols, sweeps and supported by helicopters.4 Similarly,
the BSAP Special Branch was especially prominent, its network of informers
working well since the local African population of the Zambezi valley had little
sympathy for the guerrillas. In any case the valley was an inhospitable
environment and few guerrillas penetrated beyond it. Where military supporthad
been required, temporary brigade areas were established with a Joint Operations
Centre (JOC) involving military and police representatives as well as civil
commissioners from the Department of Internal Affairs.

When
insurgency developed once more, with the opening of ZANLA’s new front in the
Centenary district of the north-east in December 1972, there was a natural
tendency to persist with previous practices. Beyond the local JOCs, the chain of
command therefore stretched upwards through provincial JOCs, a Joint Planning
Staff (JPS), and a Deputy Minister in Ian Smith’s office (from 1974), to the
Security Council of the Rhodesian Cabinet. In September 1976 a War Council
replaced the Security Council and in March 1977 a Combined Operations
Headquarters (Comops) replaced the JPS. In theory the creation of Comops should
have enabled the Security Forces to develop a well coordinated strategy for the
prosecution of the war. In reality, the command and control system failed at a
number of levels. For one thing, there was increasing friction between Army and
Police as the escalation of the war led to the replacement of BSAP personnel by
the military in positions of responsibility on JOCs. In 1973 the JOC in the
northeast was converted into a permanent operational brigade area —
‘Hurricane’.
This was followed by the establishment of ‘Thrasher’ and ‘Repulse’ in
1976, ‘Tangent’, ‘Grapple’ and ‘Splinter’ in 1977, and ‘Salops’
in

1978.
With the exception of the latter, which remained a largely administrative
creation under BSAP control, the other JOCs were now chaired almost as a matter
of course by the Army.

The Army was also increasingly critical of other
civilian government agencies, notably Internal Affairs which it held responsible
for failing to perceive the nature of the growing ZANLA threat in the northeast
prior to its eruption in 1972. Comops offered the possibility of reconciling
differences but it never had effective control over civil affairs and ministries
like Internal Affairs and Law and Order which had a considerable contribution to
make to the war effort. Moreover, Comops became entangled in the day-to-day
conduct of the war rather than in planning long-term strategy. Its commander,
Lieutenant­General Peter Walls, also assumed command of all offensive and
special forces as well as responsibility for all external operations. This left
the Army commander, Lieutenant-General John Hickman, commanding only black
troops and white territorials,while
his staff were deprived of any real function at all. One commentator with
first-hand knowledge of the system has claimed that the de
facto commander of the Army in these circumstances was the Brigadier of
Comops.5 Walls sought further clarification of his powers but was to be
disappointed, although it has been claimed that by 1979 he was the most powerful
man in Rhodesia6 and certainly the command structure as a whole was
streamlined after the internal settlement, to exclude Muzorewa and Sithole from
effective influence. At the same time Smith’s influence also waned and he was
on bad terms with Walls.

With division at the top of the system, it is not
unlikely that this will be magnified at lower levels and such was the case in
Rhodesia. There was, for example, an attempt to co-ordinate the Rhodesian
Special Air Service (SAS) and the Selous Scouts with the establishment of a
Special Forces Headquarters in July 1978. However, this fell foul of inter-unit
rivalry and was eventually confined to administering the black Security Force
Auxiliaries (SFAs) that came into existence after the internal settlement. The
rivalry between the Army and the BSAP was also apparent in the attempted
co-ordination of intelligence. Prior to 1972 intelligence was firmly a BSAP
responsibility and of its Special Branch in particular, as was so frequently the
case in British or former British territories. The Army had no intelligence
network of its own, but the lack of real insurgency simply did not necessitate
it. This was to change with the escalation of conflict in December 1972. In the
northeast, which had been generally neglected by the Rhodesian administration at
all levels, Special Branch’s traditional reliance upon a handful of picked
informers proved hopelessly inadequate. When the Army subsequently formed its
own Military Intelligence Department in 1973, however, Special Branch regarded
it with suspicion. The Department had no effective access to captured insurgents
until 1978 and was generally confined to gathering external intel­ligence,
largely through its radio interception service. There was also no Intelligence
Corps formed within the Army until July 1975. Similarly, Special Branch
initially controlled the special intelligence-gathering units which were raised
by Major Ron Reid-Daly between November 1973 and January 1974. Subse­quently
named the Selous Scouts in March 1974, the regiment came under Comops control in
1977. There is some evidence of

friction
between the Selous Scouts and the Army, the attempt by Reid-Daly to recruit
black servicemen from the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR) being persistently
resisted. Equally, the blowing of the cover of the Selous Scouts’ first
‘pseudo’ operation in January 1974 by a Special Branch officer led to
friction between the BSAP and the Scouts. A further indication of some of the
tensions within the armed forces was the allegation in 1979 that the Selous
Scouts were more intent on ivory poaching than killing guerrillas in areas
frozen to operations by other members of the Security Forces. The Army’s
Intelligence Department bugged Reid-Daly’s telephone and, amid the
reverberations, Hickman was sacked as Army commander and Reid-Daly court-martialed.
Reid-Daly was reprimanded and retired.

The lack of co-ordination of both command and
intelligence was an important drawback to the Security Forces since they would
always be stretched numerically, given the view of the Rhodesian authorities
that the effective ceiling on manpower was the available white male population.
Prior to the war, Rhodesia’s regular forces were small and in 1968 still
amounted to only 4600 men in the armed forces and 6400 in the BSAP, excluding
reserves in both cases. By 1978 the whites numbered only 260,000 in a total
population of some 6.9 million and, as the war progressed, white emigration — the
‘chicken run’ — outpaced immigration. Between 1960 and 1979 some
180,000 whites entered the country but 202,000 left, a net loss of over 13,000
whites in 1978 being the highest recorded. Under the 1957 Defence Act, young
white males were liable to a six-week period of training in the Rhodesia
Regiment, a territorial formation, followed by a reserve commitment. By 1966 the
basic term of national service had increased to 245 days. In December 1972
national service for all whites as well as Asians and coloureds (who numbered
about 30,000) between the ages of 18 and 25 was increased to a full 12 months,
while the period to be spent in the reserve was increased from four to six
years. In February 1974 the size of the annual intake was doubled and in
November restrictions placed on the ability of those liable to military service
to leave the country. In May 1976 the period of liability for territorials was
increased indefinitely and the initial term of national service increased from
12 to 18 months. In January and February 1977 the net was widened still further
with those aged between 24 and 38 compelled to do 190 days’ service per annum,those
aged between 38 and 50 made liable to 70 days’ service a year, and those aged
over 50 encouraged to volunteer for
the BSAP reserve, which required 42 days’ service per annum for this age
bracket. In September student deferments were cancelled and rewards advertised
for those willing to extend their terms of service. It should be noted that the
term of service of the older age groups was not continuous but completed as a
number of tours through the year, such as six weeks on and six weeks off to try
and minimise economic disruption. In January 1978 the deferment of two years for
new immigrants of military age was reduced to just six months, although in
October the term of service for those aged between 18 and 25 was once more
reduced to 12 months. The ultimate measure of white conscription was introduced
in January 1979 when those aged between 50 and 59 were made liable to
six-weeks’ service per annum, the new entrants being referred to as
‘Mashford’s Militia’ after a well-known Salisbury funeral parlour.

Despite
the increasing demands made upon white manpower, the great majority of the
personnel of the Security Forces remained black. Until 1979 they were also all
volunteers and there was no shortage of recruits, particularly among the Karanga
tribe. Accordingly, the RAR added a second battalion in 1974, a third in 1977
and a fourth in 1978, the establishment of the latter raising the proportion of
black servicemen from some 66 per cent of the whole to around 70 per cent.
Approximately 75 per cent of the BSAP were also black, including most of the
Police Support Units (PSU), popularly known as ‘Black Boots’. Africans were
attracted not only by good pay, housing, educational facilities and health care
but also by traditional bonds of family service to the state. By 1979, too,
there were 30 black commissioned officers in the Army. There is little evidence
of disciplinary problems among black service personnel, although it would appear
that some opposed the Anglo-Rhodesian proposals tested by the Pearce Commission
and that the majority of the RAR probably voted solidly for Mugabe in the 1980
elections.

There was therefore no pressure for African
conscription until after Muzorewa and Sithole joined the transitional government
in 1978. In October it was announced that conscription would be introduced for
educated Africans between the ages of 18 and 25 in January 1979. The measures
were then extended to all educated Africans between 16 and 60 in August 1979,
but there isevidence
of some opposition to conscription among Africans and the scheme had not been
fully implemented by the time the war ended. Somewhere between 1000 and 2000
foreigners also served with the Rhodesian Security Forces during the war, while
the South African presence between 1967 and 1975 amounted to perhaps 2000 to
3000 men at most. In theory the Security Forces thus had large numbers of men
available by the end of the war, but the requirements of the economy meant that
only a relatively small proportion could be deployed at any one time. This
usually amounted to about 25,000 men, although in the run-up to the internal
elections in April 1979, some 60,000 men were deployed in the field, but only
for a short period. It was only the establishment of the SFAs after the internal
settlement that enabled the Rhodesians to reach even this total.

The lack of manpower tended to imply that there
was little administrative ‘tail’ to the Security Forces, since traditionally
most support functions had been undertaken by African labourers. The majority of
the white national servicemen, especially older age groups, were also placed in
a variety of more or less static roles such as holding units, police reserve
units, the Guard Force created in February 1976 to assist the defence of
protected villages (PVs), and the Defence Regiment formed in 1978 to guard
important installations and communications. The principal strike formations were
the regulars of the all-white Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI). the white SAS, and
the mixed-race Selous Scouts. While the RLI and the RAR provided the men for the
‘Fire Forces’ inside Rhodesia, the SAS and Scouts were available for
external operations. There were also some other specialist units for
counter-insurgency. The BSAP, for example, had Police Anti-Terrorist Units (PATU)
as well as the PSUs, specialist anti-stock theft teams and SWAT (Special Weapons
and Tactics Teams) which were designed to contain urban terrorism. The latter,
however, was relatively limited, the most successful urban guerrilla operations
being the bomb planted in the Salisbury branch of Woolworths in August 1977 and
the rocket attack on the capital’s oil storage depot in December 1978. The
Ministry of Internal Affairs also fielded African District Security Assistants (DSAs)
from 1976 for security duties in PVs. Another specialist Army unit was the
Grey’s Scouts, a mixed-race mounted unit often used to patrol border
minefields.

The
manpower shortage also had repercussions in terms of strategy in frontier areas
and to prevent guerrilla infiltration into the interior. Ironically, the white
urban areas and farms were surrounded by the African Tribal Trust Lands (ATLs)
in a manner approximating to the Maoist guerrilla theory that the countryside
dominated by insurgents should surround the cities. The need to prevent
infiltration was an additional reason for striking at guerrilla concentrations
outside Rhodesia. The Rhodesian forces were, in fact, well suited to
counter-insurgency and had begun a systematic study of the subject in the 1950s.
Some 50 per cent of all regular training was in the form of small-unit
operations. There was also a reservoir of expertise from direct experience of
British counter-insurgency operations. The Rhodesian Far East Volunteer Unit had
served in Malaya during the Emergency in the 1950s; the then single battalion of
the RAR had served in Malaya from 1956 to 1958; and Rhodesia’s SAS had begun life as ‘C’ (Rhodesia)
Squadron of the Malayan Scouts, later named ‘C’ (Rhodesia) Squadron of the
British SAS, and had served both in Malaya and in Aden. The Rhodesian Air Force
had also sent elements to Kuwait and Aden between 1958 and 1961. Indeed, it was
sometimes alleged that there was a ‘Malayan’ clique within the armed forces,
Walls having commanded the Rhodesian SAS squadron in Malaya. More recent
experience was also available, the Selous Scouts being modelled to some extent
on Portugal’s Flechas whom Reid-Daly
had studied. There was also close study of Israeli techniques, particularly in
terms of external operations.7

Yet,
despite the expertise available, the crucial lack of co­ordination in command
and control prevented the development of the kind of distinct overall strategy
that had characterised the British operations with which the Rhodesians were so
familiar. Comops appeared after its creation in 1977 to abandon the
generally-defensive reaction to guerrilla infiltration of earlier years in
favour of a strategy of mobile counter-offensive. But, in the absence of
sufficient numbers of men on the ground, the success of the counter-offensive
largely depended upon inflicting high kill ratios. No real attempt could be made
to hold cleared areas until the SFAs became available and it was not until 1979
that an area defence system was adopted, based on firmly holding ‘Vital Asset
Ground’ corresponding to the white areas of Rhodesia.8 This did not
mean that some areas were tacitlyabandoned
to the guerrillas since elite groups such as the Selous Scouts would make
periodic forays and the remaining ground of ‘tactical importance’ outside
the vital asset ground, primarily the flLs and game parks, became available for
locating and destroying guerrillas at will. It was, however, late in the day
before such a co-ordinated strategy was evolved and it has been suggested that
the apolitical nature of the Rhodesian armed forces prevented them from
seriously coming to terms with the political aspects of guerrilla insurgency.9
There was never any real attempt at political indoctrination or
instruction within the Rhodesian armed forces and to the end of the war
guerrilla insurgency tended to be regarded as a military rather than a political
problem to which military solutions alone should be applied.